Black Waters (Strong Winds Series Book 5)

by Julia Jones

  “Nanny?” said the child. She didn’t sound so certain now.

  Xanthe forced herself to go upstairs to her bedroom: to sip

  some of her Lucozade and eat a Hobnob and an apple – then keep them down. She didn’t need her hunger to be giving her hallucinations.

  Chapter Nine

  Fritha

  Wednesday May 29, lw 0600 hw 1220 lw 1820 hw 0034

  Xanthe didn’t meet Dominic’s cousin that afternoon. She wasn’t quite clear why he didn’t show up but it couldn’t have been less of an issue. All she wanted from him was a dinghy.

  “So how do I find this dinghy?” she’d asked Dominic when she’d finished the morning’s lesson and returned the kids to Godwyn. She’d tried to talk to him about the odd things Mrs Farran had been saying and the breakages and the generally weird atmosphere in Rebow Cottage but he wouldn’t listen. Now she was going to enforce her side of the deal. She was going sailing.

  “You follow the wall on the south side of Roffey Creek and skirt the marshes as if you’re heading for Shinglehead Spit.”

  “Where’s Shinglehead Spit?”

  “End of the Flete, where the south channel curves towards the Nass. You passed it on your first…outing.”

  She hadn’t noticed. On the way down she’d been looking ahead to the open river and the sea and on the way back she’d been too angry to care.

  “The wall swings right where the creek meets the Flete and then you look to your left for Fishermen’s Hard. You’ll see a fence and some steps going down.”

  A hard? Xanthe imagined a nice concrete slipway where you could wheel your dinghy to the water. Or a good solid slope of hardcore and pebbles. She could really use that – and not just for herself. It would help her give the kids more time as well. They could only launch the dinghies from Godwyn two hours before and after high water. After that the creek shrunk away to a trickle, winding between the ramparts of mud. She couldn’t believe how much mud there was in Essex. Shiny dark flatlands and craggy, pock-marked boulders of the stuff.

  The session this morning had been much too short. They’d listened to everything she said: their progress had been spectacular. They were happy and noisy and glowing with achievement and they wanted more. They wanted her to come into lunch with them and then do something – anything – out of doors this afternoon. But the wind had freshened and she was desperate to stop being a teacher and go sailing on her own. Especially with another evening with Mrs Farran ahead of her.

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything, Xanthe?” Martha asked.

  If she went in to lunch with them, they’d never let her out.

  “I’m okay,” she lied. You don’t have to worry about me. I get supper where I’m lodging.”

  She was going to have to make sure that was true in future – even if it meant eating peanuts and tinned lychees with boil-in-the-bag rice.

  Kelly-Jane had turned grumpy and was slouching at the end of the companionway with her arms folded. Her brother, Kieran, had taken no for an answer and was heading into lunch. David and Siri were looking at Xanthe like puppy dogs pleading for a walk. Both of their faces were pink instead of pale.

  “You were so good today,” she told David once again. “You were solid. And you’ve got a real gift,” she added to Siri.

  The little girl’s eyes were open wider than most people’s; whatever was behind them remained a mystery.

  “What’s wrong with someone who’s got jelly in one of her ears and sponge cake and custard in the other?” Nelson asked. He’d lost his smile.

  “Huh? Don’t know.” He wasn’t telling the joke as if it was funny.

  Xanthe felt annoyed with him. “Siri isn’t deaf.”

  “He didn’t say it were Siri,” said Kelly-Jane.

  Martha had fetched Xanthe a wrapped sausage roll, a satsuma and a drink. “You need to let Xanthe go,” she told the kids. “She’s earned some time to herself. You’ll get your sailing lessons.”

  “Didn’t get ’em yesterday.”

  Yesterday?

  Fog. Death. Dominic – and the long grim evening in Rebow Cottage.

  “Yesterday wasn’t exactly my choice,” she said.

  “But this is, innit. You could make it up to us.”

  NO! She had to be back there again tonight. She’d done a deal. She needed me-time.

  “You’re a hard woman, Kelly-Jane, but I am in a rocky place. I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”

  She turned away and felt the breeze on her face. Oh please let this dinghy be fast.

  Dominic had told her that the dinghy was moored in the middle of the channel but that the hard wasn’t marked.

  “Will your cousin meet me there?”

  “I told you – we don’t get on.”

  Xanthe had clenched her hands into fists so her nails dug into her palms. She clamped her jaw so she couldn’t speak. She wanted to tell him to go stuff his cousin and his cousin’s dinghy and his aunt and his pathetic family feuds because she’d had it up to the brim with Flinthammock and she was ringing her mother and going home where she’d got a dinghy of her own to sail.

  Except she couldn’t go home because she’d promised the kids. And anyway the sponsors would surely have repossessed Spray by now.

  Maybe some of her frustration showed because Dominic had stopped his obsessive polishing of Godwyn’s already gleaming handrail and looked at her directly.

  “I told my cousin who you were, Xanthe, and he said as he ‘reckoned you’d understand why the dinghy were for you’.”

  It was obvious that he was quoting exact words. It didn’t mean that Xanthe understood them.

  She reached the wall on the opposite side of the creek. Now she could see a whole new landscape. A wide green expanse of marshland stretching between the creek and the main river. Lush grass and reed-fringed ponds and fat cattle grazing. And in the distance, across the far side of the Blackwater, was the St Peter’s power station with its cranes high above it.

  Xanthe gulped in a lungful of fresh air, resisted the urge to fling her arms wide and shout aloud with happiness. Yes! She said to the open sunlit world. And she ran.

  She almost overran the hard.

  Hard? What were these Essex people like? This so-called ‘hard’ was no more than a line of fat cement-filled bags laid down to make stepping stones across the mud. The water was dense with silt and she had to stretch out her foot and feel for each step as she waded out to the dinghy across the ebbing tide.

  Dominic’s cousin’s dinghy was an old wooden Firefly called Fritha. Xanthe’d seen the GRP version at rallies – they were robust, two-person dinghies and some of the universities had them but Fritha was like their great-granny. Her varnished hull had darkened and streaked with age and there were signs of water seepage around the base of her centreboard case. Her ropes were greyish and stiff with salt and her mast was some weird part-metal construction that could only have looked modern on Noah’s ark.

  He said as he reckoned you’d understand why the dinghy were for you.

  Well, thanks a lot. Xanthe pulled the mainsail and jib out of a mildewed canvas bag and set them without enthusiasm. The sail number shocked her – 486 – just three figures. Fritha must be seriously old, even for a Firefly. Madrigal would have wanted her humanely destroyed! Or sent to the Third World.

  Fritha was quick, though. As soon as she was out of the Flete and into the main river she was heeling to the breeze and Xanthe was hiking out over the varnished side-deck with her feet hitched under the toe-straps and sending up a serious prayer that the ancient webbing was sound. Never mind the classic West African figure: she was a lightweight in a two-person dinghy. She hardened her sheets, set a course even closer to the wind, tensed her thigh and stomach muscles and stretched out flat as she could go. She was going to ache later. It was so going to be worth it.

 
The Blackwater was a wide river but she was across in minutes and the ugly bulk of the former power station was fouling her wind. She bore away on a broad reach. The afternoon sun was sparkling on the wavelets, the wind and tide were hurrying them along and Fritha seemed to skitter with delight as they headed out to sea.

  I could sail myself back into college. Or home. I could make the River Orwell before nightfall if I chose.

  But I don’t choose, she added quickly to herself.

  She took one long look down the curving coast that ran north towards her home river and the people she loved; then she glanced south to the chapel of St Cedd-on-the-Wall. Someone had said there was a peace camp there. She couldn’t imagine a more special place for it to be.

  Then she rounded up into the wind again and put in a couple of tacks. Plus a 720 degree turn, simply to divert herself and because she could. Fritha was amazing for such an old boat. Xanthe put the Firefly through a private dance: tacking, turning, gybing, heeling. She made her sail sideways and backwards. Maybe one day they’d make dinghy-dancing an Olympic event.

  But Xanthe wouldn’t be there.

  And she was a racer, not a dancer.

  She had been a racer.

  If she wanted to get back into the GBR squad – ever – she was going to have to show that she’d changed her attitude.

  Except that she hadn’t

  changed

  at all.

  Had she?

  Her thoughts returned to the private meeting room and to the group of a dozen people seated more or less unhappily round the long table.

  She knew what she’d done.

  Yes, she had punched Madrigal Shryke.

  Could she tell them why?

  I couldn’t help wondering whether you’d ever thought how much it would mean to your own country if you elected to sail for them? Wherever it is in Africa that you originally came from…They probably haven’t even got a sailing team! Rig a bathtub and you’d make it unopposed…Your own tribe!

  Would she ever get Madrigal’s words out of her head?

  She was British. This was her country. But Madrigal had made her feel like a total outsider. And then she’d behaved exactly like the barbarian they were saying she was.

  The chairman had asked her whether she could express any regret for what she’d done. She wanted to say yes. She knew that there were people round that table who liked her and had believed in her talent. She could have found supporters if she’d said the right words.

  Madrigal had made her punch: she wasn’t going to make her lie as well. So she told them no, she couldn’t. Not entirely.

  “Oh come along, Xanthe!” Griselda, the head coach, had burst out. “You’re academically gifted, you’re musical, you’re an exceptionally talented sailor. Your family are backing you, your sponsors believe in you. If you and Madrigal have a personality clash, can you not deal with it in some more…civilised manner?”

  Xanthe jerked at the mainsheet. Fritha luffed, resentfully. She stalled and lost way. This was like kicking the cat for your own mistake. Totally unacceptable.

  It had been that single word. If the coach – a former three-times medallist and a decent person who Xanthe utterly admired – hadn’t chosen that particular word, ‘civilised’, she might have had a go at explaining.

  But then she had happened to look round the room. Everyone there – male and female, young and old, grizzled and weather-beaten, pink-cheeked, brunette or blonde – every one, with the exception of herself, was ‘white’. All of them, at that moment, seemed to Xanthe to possess that comfortable assurance, that kindliness even, that unquestioned assumption that they knew what ‘civilised’ was and, whatever it was, they had it.

  There was so much she could have said that Xanthe had said nothing at all.

  So now she apologised – wordlessly – to Fritha; hardened her sheets again and prepared to come about.

  The Romans had defended this shoreline against the Saxons: the Vikings had sailed up this river to win one of the most invasive battles in English history. Her pre-research on the internet had told her that this was one of the last remaining stretches of coast where she could get an idea what the World War Two sea-defences had been like: ‘From Sales Point to Bradwell Waterside there are twelve pillboxes in less than three miles.’ As long as she kept an eye on the tide she wouldn’t risk being late for Iris and she would have made a proper start on her extended essay.

  She dropped anchor just off the edge of a bathing area on the seaward side of the former power station. The ground here was hard – as much sand as mud. There were cranes angular against the skyline, scaffolding, men in hard hats, the noise of machinery: heavy hammers, pneumatic drills, the clang of metal girders. Xanthe took her time stowing Fritha’s mainsail and jib. She needed to be sure that the anchor would hold.

  Then she slipped over the side and waded ashore feeling quite unreasonably excited. She had left an area of saltings, grey sticky mud and tiny twisting channels: she had arrived at a long, pale golden beach. The sort of beach that made you want to walk for miles. Her canvas sailing shoes dripped and squelched but she was glad she was wearing them. Once she neared the top of the tideline the beach seemed of be made almost entirely of shell. Humps and swathes of shell – cockles, mussels, whelks and big rock oysters. She didn’t have names for them all. They were crunchy beneath her feet, empty and dry and dead.

  She looked back at Fritha. The dinghy was riding securely to her anchor. No worries there. Then she looked both ways along the beach. To the right the ex-power station. To the left that long, seductive stretch into blueness. She could see the chapel standing quiet against the distant sky. The word ‘fritha’ meant peace – how did she know that? – she just did.

  Then she climbed the river wall and discovered that there was a deep ditch preventing her from exploring further inland. She could see a small, low, tough-looking building set well back in the flat fields. It was her first World War Two pillbox but it was on the wrong side of the dyke and it also looked as if it might be private.

  She had to make a choice: left or right? If she set off towards the chapel it would be hard to make herself turn back.

  The ex-power station was huge and distracting. What could you do with something like that which was past its sell-by? There were loads of workers, some of them virtually of sight, so high on the scaffolding. Xanthe gazed upwards and felt giddy. People who worked that far from the ground were amazing. They’d have hard hats and harnesses and safety procedures, lights and cameras – but all the same…

  She dragged her eyes away and turned right. She hadn’t gone more than about twenty metres before she walked straight over her second pillbox. Its roof was constructed of slabs, level with the height of the river wall and there was some sort of lush green plant doing its best to act as camouflage. She got out her camera and took a few photos then she jumped down onto the beach and did her best to peer inside. She felt repelled by the darkness: frustrated by the impossibility of pushing more than her head through the small square gaps. Why was there no door? And why did she automatically assume that people would have peed in there?

  “Has anyone been left on anchor watch while you’re busy spying?”

  She jumped backwards, scraping her head, and stared towards the river again. Fritha was fine. So who was fretting?

  There was an elderly man standing, legs astride, on the concrete top of the pillbox, arms folded, staring down at her. His hair was long and thick and bleached like the dead shells. It was parted in the middle and flowed strong and wavy down below his shoulders. She guessed it must have been golden once.

  “Manners please. You haven’t answered me.”

  There was a moustache as well, combed and lavish and drooping either side of his mouth like a well-groomed walrus. Not that he looked like a walrus. He was a strong-looking old man, energetic and upright and with those
bright blue Nordic eyes that seemed to be surrounding her here. He could have been auditioning to play Thor or some Hollywood Viking chief. The rest of him was pretty standard – if your standard was some ‘By Appointment’ county outfitter: waxed jacket, check shirt, cavalry twill trousers and highly polished brown leather shoes.

  “I checked the anchor myself before I left. The holding ground seems good and I’m not expecting to be here long.”

  “Purpose of visit?”

  “I’m looking at what I think is a World War Two pillbox. Is that a problem?”

  “It’s a problem to me if I observe neglect of a historic dinghy.”

  Xanthe thought about Fritha’s condition. Yes, fair point, she could probably use some attention. But how did he know?

  “This is the first afternoon I’ve sailed her.”

  “And it’s obvious you don’t appreciate what has been entrusted to you,” he snapped. “I’ll need your proof of identification now.”

  There was a startlingly clean Polaris all-terrain vehicle parked on the broad track that ran between the river wall and the dyke. Did this man see himself as some kind of border guard? She took a deep breath and struggled with her anger.

  “My name is Xanthe Ribiero. I’m a volunteer sailing instructor at the Flinthammock Project and I have permission from the dinghy’s owner. I don’t know what you mean by identification but I’m sure that Dominic Gold will vouch for me. He’s the Companion-in-Chief at the lightship.”

  “But I am the Commander of the Saxon Shore. I know Dominic.” He almost spat the word. “I know his penchant for degenerates but I had no idea that even Dominic would stoop as low as this. I recognise you, Miss Ribiero and you are not welcome here. You should never have been allowed to sail that dinghy.”

  Xanthe’s confidence drained into the sand. She’d almost forgotten her outcast status.

  She wasn’t intending to back off, however. “I don’t believe I’m trespassing,” she said.